The Lake and the Lost Girl

by Jacquelyn Vincenta

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  Copyright © 2017 by Jacquelyn Vincenta McShulskis

  Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Laywan Kwan

  Cover image © OFFSET Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment to the following poets for use of their lines that are now in the public domain: Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily,” “Sugar,” and “Preciosilla”; Amy Lowell, “The Letter”; Christina Georgina Rossetti, “My Secret”; Lola Ridge, “Dedication” and “The Ghetto”; Elinor Wylie, “Escape,” “Fire and Sleet and Candlelight,” and “Incantation”; Fannie Stearns Davis, “The Dream Self”; Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, “The Witch”; Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “Demeter”; Sara Teasdale, “The Net,” “What Do I Care,” and “In a Darkening Garden”; Georgia Douglas Johnson, “The Heart of a Woman”; Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “The Drowned Mariner”; Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Ashes of Life” and “The Poet and His Book”; and to Mildred Amelia Barker, “Not Again,” about whom no biographical or copyright ownership information was located.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpts from “The Plum Gatherer,” “The Bobolink,” “The Anguish,” “There at Dusk I Found You,” “Mist in the Valley,” and “For Poe-Chin, a Boatman on the Yellow Sea” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, www.millay.org.

  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from “Casabianca,” “Imber Nocturnus,” and “The Wave” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from “Kept,” “The Crossed Apple,” and “The Crows” from The Blue Estuaries.

  “The Flume,” by Louise Bogan, is used by permission of The Louise Bogan Charitable Trust.

  “The Study of Lakes,” by Becky Cooper, is used with her permission.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Bob Sperling, whose love for the lakes, the lights, and me changed my life

  Prologue

  White Hill, Michigan—October 1939

  Put something down.

  Put something down some day.

  Put something down some day in.

  Put something down some day in my.

  In my hand.

  In my hand right.

  In my hand writing.

  Put something down some day in my handwriting.

  ~ Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), “Sacred Emily”

  Mary Walker crouched against the attic wall, waiting. Two floors below, her husband hurled an ax into logs stacked near the woodstove, and she could hear chunks of wood clatter against the walls and floor as he cursed her. The fire was cold, there was no supper prepared, and she’d brought her coat up into the attic with her so that he would believe she was out. But hidden upstairs, her body was attuned to his every motion and his exact location in the house.

  Eventually he would leave. He would leave either to go looking for her or to get drunk and forget about her. She just had to wait. Patience was so difficult for her. But she was just hours from freedom now—she and Robert would depart tonight. Tonight! She clutched the two small bags she had packed for the crossing to Chicago on the Fata Morgana. If all was going as planned, Robert was waiting for her this very minute, just half a mile away in the Lake Michigan channel.

  In recent weeks, Bernard’s fits of fury had intensified, almost as if he sensed Mary’s intention to leave him. And his rage about her inability to conceive a child made it clear what she was to him, and that he would never truly support the woman and the poet she had been before they married. She had no doubt about the importance of getting away from him. But in this moment, when she was finally packed and ready to make this cold water crossing, the lake’s violence and the unsettling purple sky made Mary afraid.

  Pulling her gaze from the round window beneath the attic’s peak, she turned to the sewing box in her lap, for it had always comforted her. A loose knob jiggled just as it had when her mother owned the box, and a quilted lining held needles and pins purchased before she was born. She had loosened a few tacks in the lining so that she could hide the special needle, and she reached in with one finger. Yes, it was still there—the needle that had nothing to do with sewing. She tucked it deeper, yearning for the relief of her medicine. Up against it, she slid a folded poem that no one would read until she was far from this White Hill life. In Chicago she would be a different woman. She would use another name to publish her poetry, and thousands of people would read every line. But until then she had to hide the most dangerous words.

  “If you think you can make a fool of me, Mary Walker,” Bernard roared to no one, “you haven’t learned a goddamn thing.”

  Her heart stuttered at the heavy thud of something being thrown to the floor, and she shrank closer to the wall, her hands clu
tching the sewing box more tightly. Bernard knew how she cherished it, and if she left it here, he would smash it apart. She stared into the box at the threads and buttons, running her fingers lightly over their gentle shapes. No, she wouldn’t leave it behind; she must take it. The truth was, she’d need something like this in her new life—she’d need precisely this! With no furniture of her own, with nothing of home, she might really go mad. Part of her could live in this box.

  The small window’s frame rattled in a blast of wind, and she leaned over to look out, hollow with fear. The night sky was starless and black. It was past time to go. God help her if the storm raged too long. Once they pushed off into that cold lake, she could never return to White Hill.

  At last the front door slammed, and seconds later, she saw Bernard taking long strides down the road, away from the lake and toward town. Her eyes caught on an object gripped in his right hand. It was the ax. Her gaze swooped blindly around the dim room, then returned to the dark form of her husband. Was he looking for her with an ax? Even from the attic she could see that his gait was drunken with anger. When at last he had been swallowed by shadows and trees, she sat frozen, forcing herself to wait. Just three minutes. Two.

  “Gather your courage. Now, Mary. Get on with it,” she said finally, and the feeling of her voice in her throat gave her strength.

  She stuffed strands of blond hair up under her hat, stood beneath the low ceiling, and moved quickly, gripping the bags’ handles with sweating hands. She picked her way along a memorized path through the dark attic, raced down the stairs, and crossed the cold, naked floors of the house to flee through the windblown sand and grass. The sewing box knocked against her hip, her bags grew heavy quickly, and the sky began to hurl rain. She scanned the wet darkness. No one was near. No one following.

  Then at last it was there—the channel light—and thirty steps later she could see Robert’s boat rocking wildly near the pier. She wanted to laugh and cry. She searched the open, storm-blown sand again, and then again, in every direction, but she detected no watching eyes, and out on his boat that loyal man was waiting, just as he had said he would be.

  Her feet sank and slipped in the damp sand, and her heart smashed against her ribs. Wind threshed the grasses that hissed around her knees, and as her boots reached the solid pier boards, the Fata Morgana heaved up and down on turbulent waves, its prow slapping the lake.

  The voices of the water and the night urged Mary to hurry, crying out that she was only doing what she had to do, that the notion she could stay in White Hill and make her life work was only a fantasy. She had never really had a choice at all.

  1

  White Hill, Michigan—March 1999

  Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper

  Like draggled fly’s legs,

  What can you tell of the flaring moon

  Through the oak leaves?

  ~ Amy Lowell (1874–1925), “The Letter”

  Lydia Carroll had no idea what she would find among the dense woods off Gravenstein Road. The poet’s house was now little more than a grave, and the driveway was squeezed to a footpath by wild growth. Dirty snow banked the north sides of trees, and ice pooled in the surrounding lowland that was once a celery farm. Mary Stone Walker would have walked this way a thousand times. Ten thousand.

  I begged the Spring, “Return,

  we wait beside the long, small fires of winter.”

  Facts about the poet were few beyond her writings, and Lydia was at the point of feeling almost desperate for answers about the woman’s actual life—most importantly, how it ended, for even sixty years after her disappearance, no one was sure. Lydia knew that no matter how prolific the author, even if she had left behind stacks of journals, still there would be missing, as well as misleading, information. And now there was more at stake than simply answering an intriguing literary question. Mary Stone Walker’s mysteries had gone unresolved for so long that they threatened the well-being of Lydia’s family.

  She pushed through the heavy vines that blocked the path, and there stood the house—dilapidated, gaping, as if silenced midscream. She took in the wooden shape of the place and the wooded yard around it, considering how it might have felt to come home to it, and her imagination contended with ghosts. Lydia had been in the place with her husband twelve years before, both of them giddy with excitement to roam the silent rooms where Mary Stone Walker had once lived, but the police had shown up, and Carson Community College administrators had warned Frank the next day that the college’s relationship with the Evans family was no longer friendly and any visits to the house would be viewed as trespassing.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Carroll.”

  Startled, Lydia turned to find a slight man of about forty-five walking toward her, his hairline receding, his pale-blue eyes cold. He extended his arm. “Lincoln Babcock.”

  “Good morning.” She smiled and shook his gloved hand with her bare one. “Lydia Carroll. I so appreciate you doing this.”

  “And your husband, the professor?” The man looked around behind her. “He’ll be joining us?”

  “No. It’s just me.” She watched Lincoln’s friendly expression slip. “He was not part of the plan today.”

  “Didn’t you say that you wished to see the interior of the house for an academic project?”

  “That’s right.”

  Lincoln paused. “But you’re a romance novelist.”

  “Yes,” she said patiently, “that’s how I make my living, although I write other things as well.” Knowing that her small size and unruly red hair made her look younger than she was, Lydia put forth as professional an attitude as possible, even though Lincoln’s attitude was immediately irritating. The common assumption that the writing of genre novels and academic essays was incompatible still stung.

  “These photographs are for Frank’s book about Mary Stone Walker’s life and work, which are also subjects of his PhD dissertation. The book is planned for the general public.” She lifted her camera case, then unzipped it. At the confused look still lingering on Lincoln’s face, she added, “Frank is my husband, the professor.”

  “Yes, I am acquainted with your husband’s name. And his work.” Lincoln’s mouth twisted. “Why isn’t he here himself? Call me suspicious, but I must ask: You’re not thinking that you will turn the fiasco of Walker’s life into a romantic novel?”

  Lydia flushed. “As I said, I am gathering information about Mary Stone Walker for Professor Carroll’s nonfiction book, but seeing as how he believes that Mary went on to live and write for years after she disappeared from White Hill, his perspective on her is actually more romantic than mine.”

  “Precisely, yes, she ran off,” Lincoln said, grabbing on to a subject that apparently distressed him even more. “In that respect, your husband would find supporters among Mary Walker’s husband’s family.” Sparks of anger lit his eyes. “In fact, Bernard Evans issued rewards for information about her because he was certain that when she ‘disappeared,’ she had merely fled.”

  “Yes, I know that.” Lydia hoped she didn’t sound impatient, but she wanted him to realize that she hadn’t walked into this moment like some uninformed tourist. He was obviously skeptical, and she needed to get into the house.

  “So we have continued to feel she was not a tragic victim,” Lincoln went on emphatically. “She was in fact a liar and a thief. You probably aren’t aware that she stole money and jewels before she left.”

  “Stole money and jewels?” Lydia frowned. She had never heard this accusation before during all their years of research, although they had often stumbled onto other odd, unsubstantiated rumors.

  “Oh yes,” Lincoln answered firmly, crossing his arms over his chest. “So far, the problem has been that those who like Mary Stone Walker the artist tend not to like the truth about Mary Walker the woman. After she abandoned Bernard Evans, he lost his mind and ruined t
heir assets, so as far as most people are concerned, she does not deserve any further consideration, let alone the reverence academics like your husband espouse.”

  Lydia took a slow breath and tried to ignore her rapidly growing dislike of Lincoln Babcock, letting her gaze rove the thick branches crowded protectively around the sides and roof of the abandoned house. Last year’s russet oak leaves rattled in the slightest currents of air.

  “I gather you’re close to the family, Mr. Babcock?”

  “They have entrusted me with a great deal. A very great deal.” He turned the collar of his wool coat up. “And I think everyone can agree that a stack of poems, no matter how exquisite, does not make up for an immoral life.”

  He gazed at her, folding his hands behind his back, and his expression was so absurdly superior that Lydia had an urge to laugh. In her mind, she heard what Frank’s response would have been, and she pictured the crushing expression he typically wore during conversations with those he perceived as intellectually inferior.

  The dark truth was, one theory of Mary’s disappearance held that her husband, Bernard, killed her in a fit of jealousy and hid her body within the shuttered house for weeks before burying or destroying it. When Lydia first met Frank at the University of Michigan where he was a graduate student teaching English and she was in her junior year as an English literature major, she had gained his attention at a literary event when she spoke at length about Mary Stone Walker and her poetry, explaining who the White Hill poet was and how she had disappeared and never been found. Frank had approached her afterward, and the two of them had talked about poetry in Lydia’s apartment until sunlight burned around the edges of her paper window shade.

  The weaving of their thoughts and emotions that night had been more intimate than anything Lydia had ever experienced, and over the following months, they’d read Mary Walker’s poems and journals out loud together, wondering and theorizing. Murder was the scenario Frank had initially believed, asserting that it was the most realistic when Bernard Evans’s documented violence and Mary’s unrecovered body were taken into account.